


07

by Ulawan5



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drowning, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:40:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9663929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ulawan5/pseuds/Ulawan5
Summary: A young man must face the aftermath of the battle that had finally killed his partner, Aki.It had been a long time coming.Shiro never wanted it to happen like this.





	

**Author's Note:**

> \- Shiro belongs to tumblr user vicmchas, Aki belongs to me.  
> -Alternate universe involves a parasitic Angel having infected a character for months beforehand.  
> -This contains description of lung discomfort due to LCL, minor gore, self injury, nausea, suicidal thoughts, and dysphoria (it's pretty nasty and dire, but I like the atmosphere and detail of the thing so much I really wanted to post it).  
> -Enjoy!

 The LCL felt heavy in his lungs.

 The warmth was stifling, suffocating, it was like being a fetus inside of a freshly roadkilled mother deer. There was nothing left to gain out of here, it just stagnated around him. Power had been cut from the eva, but the LCL was still warm, the life supports still functioning on reserve power before they could arrive to extract him.

 Not long before, he had been forced to:

  1. Watch his best friend and boyfriend be ripped apart by an Angel,
  2. Feel his own hands through this very machine destroy him.



 

 Shiro couldn’t feel anything but the warmth. The viscosity around him, seeping into the roots of his hair, combining with the snot in his nose that would surely be running if it weren’t being whisked away along with his tears. It felt disgusting. He felt it curdle with the saliva in his mouth. It tasted like watered down blood, mixed with something else. Something alien. Something decaying. Or maybe it was the wound he’d created himself on his cheek as he’d tried to keep himself from screaming. He couldn’t let NERV know that this was getting to him this badly. He couldn’t bear the thought of the awful shrill noise reverberating through the entry plug that didn’t match how he spoke. 

 He simply lay in the cockpit seat, LCL threatening to make its way back out of his stomach and further contaminate his breathing medium. The LCL surrounding him, saturating every cell in his body, soaking into every molecule in his plugsuit.

 

 Headquarters gave the signal that they were arriving. It didn’t matter. He had to spend more time in this revolting fluid.

 Extraction was the worst yet. It’s always awful to expel two and a half liters of fluid from your lungs. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever get it all out. The first exhale is just a stream of liquid falling from his mouth. The first inhale sputters past fluid within the alveoli and burns and snaps against the new air as he tries to find purchase in it for oxygen. It drips on everything, makes him want to vomit just to get it all away from him. It spills down the plugsuit, clings to his body, dries in his hair, drips from his mouth as he coughs the rest away into a plastic bag for testing. They test everything they can get when you’re an eva pilot. Just to make sure you’re “okay.” Some days he thinks that the LCL he can’t get out had become part of his blood and just absorbed by his lungs. 

 But today it mocks him, it festers, it makes him feel like he’s drowning. It crusts on him during debriefing in the helicopter. His face feels taut and restricted as his cheeks warm against the air as he tries to keep himself together, and the suit sticks to itself where it folds with his body. The cold wind shooting from the open sides of the vehicle does nothing to help him, only saps his body heat faster. His hair is damn near frozen -if by cold or by fluid- by the time he arrives, his thighs numb, his hands shaking. 

He feels like meat on bones for all that NERV seems to care. All he can feel is bones and the chafing of the thin plugsuit and all of its uselessness as a garment. The tyvek-elastic tissue paper that they call clothing only accelerates the process of hypothermia. But it’s better than being in the eva. At least here he knows he could move and warm himself, but he chooses not to. He wants to let it sink in, to make his body feel as cold as his heart did. There’s nobody to spin him in the air and make the cold worth it.

 

The locker room was his first bite of privacy, he hoped at least. You never can know if there are planted cameras, but he can’t bring himself to care. Warm tears spill over and cut through the film on his face immediately. Air fills his half-cleared lungs in a gasp and rushes back out as he begins to sob. His pelvis thunks against the bench and he doubles over, pulling his hair and crushing his eyes as the primal sounds he makes wrack his body. 

 He was finally gone. It was a long time coming. Maybe knowing it would happen is what made it worse. Nothing can prepare you for these things. All he could think about was how he’d never get to feel him again. Never be able to witness the presence of him at night as his arms snaked around his torso to hold him. Never watch him with awe when he was sculpting his hair every morning, or cleaning his glasses or reading or looking at him or speaking or smiling and it was all too much. It was too much for him to be just gone. Even with all of the grandeur that the Angel caused, how he went out like a flashbang and blinded everyone around him, even with the hideous scarring footage that Unit 06 broadcasted of his untimely demise none of it felt real.

 Shiro didn’t want to think about his loving friend’s face splitting in half to show what had lie behind it. But think he did about how he’d been mixing saliva with the...parasite in his boyfriend. How there was probably still traces of his kiss before this mission in the black slime that had leaked from Aki’s mouth in his final moments of probably consciousness. How parts he had his arms wrapped around just that morning were split to show eyes and organs and bone. How the Angel probably knew what the coffee still in his stomach contained. Creamer and chocolate and cinnamon. If it cared to find out.

 All of it was gone. Dissolved or wrecked or set ablaze. Never to be witnessed again.

 

 Nobody would ever experience the laugh of Akira Minami again. 

Shiro pulls the interface headset from his hair, ripping out a few strands and undoing half of his ponytail. He runs his fingers jaggedly through his caked hair. He can’t move the air nearly fast enough as he chokes on his raw throat. Sounds slur into extended groans that are cut off to swallow and sniff and hyperventilate. He never was a pretty crier. He just hopes that he can keep his voice low enough to stay comfortable with it.

 He pulls at his hair and sobs at the space between the bench and the floor for a good twenty minutes or more, defrosting in the ambient air conditioning that’s still at least ten degrees warmer than where he had been. Crying doesn’t really help. It’s just letting out what he’d bottled up for the past hour. 

 He starts to come to his senses after thinking about how disgusting and tainted he feels.

 He’s got to get out of this plugsuit. 

 His fingers scrabble for the compressor shut off, feeling the material sag around him shortly after. Flakes of dried LCL float to the floor, and the smell refills his nostrils, bringing up bile to threaten his throat again at the memory. He kicks the remains of the suit away from him. Reusability be damned. Shiro’s street clothes sit on the next bench over. He tries to push out of his mind the fact that Aki’s are just behind the plastic curtain. Never to be worn by him again. 

 

 Shiro flexes his toes before padding towards the showers. The wet sound of pruned feet fills the room while he feels his feet get colder by the step in the air. He picks up a towel and toiletries set on his way, and throws a shower stall open. The handle on the wall is shoved upwards, and water spews out of the shower head directly onto Shiro’s exposed back. He wouldn’t admit to flinching under the rush of chilled water, not for a second. But as soon as the spray begins to warm, his legs sink out from under him and he slides against the plastic wall guard onto the floor. He stares at the mold attempting to grow under the drain cover, watching strands of it be pulled by the current towards abyss. He hates this. He hates the world and everything physical about it. He just wants it to wash away, to leave him alone, to be pulled into the drain like so many droplets of everything under the sun. 

 He was going to spend Christmas with him. He was going to fail a final and get chewed out he was going to graduate with his boyfriend. Fuck it all, they’d have gotten married had it lasted.

 But here he sits, legs splayed in a shower stall like his organs or his heartstrings, all laid out before him. There's bruises he doesn't remember, ones he does, scalds, scrapes, a nice crop of hair on his legs since he decided he didn't need to ever wear a skirt again. It was all still there, even though he hadn't felt real for hours. Still hunks of meat on a skeleton.

 He thinks about how Aki never got a shower after being defiled. How he always demanded one after piloting and despised going without. Aki would have hated knowing he wouldn't get to wear a white tie formal suit to his own funeral. There was nothing left of the corpse: it all had to be disposed of. To prevent the Angel from having a second chance.  Or something bullshit like that. He saw that core be crushed and destroyed (after his boyfriend's head in the same fashion). It wasn't like they could resurrect themselves from the dead unaided. 

 Shiro shifts to clumsily unbox a tiny bar of soap and a washcloth tablet. He lazily cleans at first, feet, legs, hands, etc, then it turns to scrubbing, to scraping away at his skin with the rough towel for minutes till  his skin is pink and raw and starting to scald in the gradually heating water. Fingers scratch the oil and LCL out of his scalp and strip it with shampoo. It's got to go. He pulls out strands of hair that come loose from his head and chucks them to the side out of contempt. He never wants to come back.

 At length, he stands, satisfied in a crude sense that he accomplished something. He shuts off the tap, and snatches a towel from the hook outside to begin the long dry time of his hair. He hates it. He hates it. He hates this place and all of the happy memories it holds. Shiro dresses as quickly as possible, clothes having been cleaned they scrape his abraded skin. He doesn't care anymore. He plunks back down onto the bench, almost ready to leave for home because it's getting late.

 Shoes don’t go back on without a fight. Damn canvas things never can sit right without a few minutes struggling. Childish as it sounds he always had help putting on his shoes. Which isn’t to say he didn’t help Aki with simple things too. It just adds to the emptiness around him. 

 He’s so tired. He’s so fucking tired he needs to sleep for an eternity. Maybe he could catch Aki as he leaves. The thought of dreaming about him again rises his stomach back up, through the rot in his guts, a little bit of hope and excitement. But it fades away when he stands. He looks out into the barren locker room, stretching on for tens of yards. Really, it’s absurd how much space there is here. Maybe he should say something into it. Before people can hear him. Before he disturbs neighbors or a crowd or an escort.

 

 Shiro's mouth sticks to itself, his tongue feels like foam, breath rancid, he almost can’t remember how to use air to make sounds.

 

  "It should have been me.”


End file.
